Since 3 days ago I have a strange issue: both my Gentoo systems does not poweroff or reboot. I use systemd. In openrc everything is just fine, but, due to configuration, I'm unable to fully use graphical interface with openrc.
I downgraded systemd (207 currently), gentoo-sources, completely disable Gentoo section in kernel, but no success. I found some topics dated somewhere in 2010 regarding wmi on arch, but was an dead road.
The only untested possible culprit remain glibc (2.18 ), but I can't downgrade it
One of system is UEFI, one is normal BIOS. The BIOS one sometimes act normally on systemctl poweroff, one from 3-4 tries, the UEFI one stop on Storage is finalized.
acpid is started. started or not does not make any difference.

I'm also experiencing problem to shutdown/reboot/logoff with GDM. Can't find a way to reproduce it yet.
When it does so, trying to reboot in command line indicates that /dev/initctl cannot be accessed.

Yes, definitely is related. /dev/initctl is missing due to glibc-2.18 - I also found that reference in journalctl.
Please, can you confirm that this is your glibc version ?

Later: gentoo systemd-initctl[2769]: Received environment initctl request. This is not implemented in systemd.
Can you, please, confirm ?_________________Sorry for my English. I'm still learning this language.

I haven't checked journalctl
I'll try when this happens again. I still haven't found the conditions to reproduce it, but I guess it has to do with system suspend, wakeups etc and dual screen (laptop + vga output). Or maybe it was because of incomplete system update, since I've experienced with downgrades, rebuilds of some parts, etc. Now everything is up-to-date, we'll see ...

The message about /dev/initctl was appaering on tty when I entered commands such as reboot or shutdown or init 0. Something about too much delay.
The system was really slow once i tried to shut it down through Gnome. Long to log in on tty and to get to the command prompt after that.

allows me to reboot, but that doesn't solve the problem.
Plus, I'm still unable to reproduce it now that I rebooted. Tried several possibility like going into suspend first, etc, but it shutdown fine so far.

Well, I tried a lot of combinatios, even restored oldest backup and incrementally update it.
In the end, I can report just a half victory: the computer with BIOS stop/reboot corect. I no longer can reproduce the issue on it.
The UEFI one, I'm still trying...

On machine with BIOS keeping sysvinit-2.88-r3 (-r5 is the latest) did the trick. But I can not say for sure that it is the culprit because masked -r5 version didn't solve the problem on second computer._________________Sorry for my English. I'm still learning this language.

Just a head up: the computer with BIOS seems to be all right. The UEFI one still in trouble. I think I'm waiting for gnome-3.10 to hit the portage (and hopefully gcc-4.8.2 as about the same time) to do a scrach build. I'm out of ideeas, unable to point the finger to the culprit package. If you know what is wrong you can report it in bugzilla and wait for a fix. But this seems to be a very rare case, or, perhaphs, a big bistake made somehow by me, or a unfortunate mix of hardware, or ... I think you understand my frustration _________________Sorry for my English. I'm still learning this language.

Could not get the system bus. Make sure the message bus daemon is running! Message: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: Connection refused

And FINALLY solve the error on the UEFI computer: it was https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=485070
Strange thing, I started and stopped php dozen of times manually - no glitch. It fail to stop only at shutdown/reboot. Even strange, no issue on BIOS computer...
I hope the thing will function until gcc-4.8.2. launch as I intend to do a full rebuild.

Are you using php-fpm also ?_________________Sorry for my English. I'm still learning this language.

Happened with vanilla 3.10.7 too, so it's not the Gentoo options. Perhaps I'll try the latest kernel and see if it works. Or start going backwards between 3.10.7 and 2.8.13 and see where it broke down. That will take a long time. I'll do it by binary search.

Upgraded all my boxes to latest ~amd64 gentoo-sources kernel and latest ~amd64 sysvinit. Two boxes shut down and reboot fine. This box hangs after printing "remounting / as read-only".

Tonight I manually unmounted all drives and partitions except '/' (mount point /dev/sdb3). I killed X with "/etc/init.d/xdm stop" which responded with "stopping slim". I then typed "reboot" and a shutdown sequence started ending with "remounting / as read-only". I went out to shop at three stores returning forty-five minutes later to find the screen in the same spot. I power-cycled with the power button. This box triple boots with Windows XP and Mythbuntu, both of which reboot with no problem. That rules out a motherboard problem. Gentoo is on the second hard drive a Western Digital Velociraptor.

Kernel 3.8.13 still reboots but I don't want to run it because it is hard masked for errors and it gives USB errors when booting.

Manually powering off may be OK because I never get the boot message about unmounting uncleanly, but it is disconcerting and inconveniant to not just command a reboot, walk away, and come back to the rebooted system.

Any ideas on further troubleshooting? What does 'init' do after "remounting / as read-only"? If it is waiting for a process to end, how can I tell what process? After '/' is read only, there can't be any log messages." Is there a debug or verbose version of init that prints more messages to the screen.

For me was two problems (solved now) php-fpm which take almost 3 minutes to stop/fail and the error suddenly disappear with recent 3.11.2 kernel. Before kernel, disabled acpid allowed computer to shutdown/reboot normaly.
Unfortunately it was an try & error procedure, and, finally, no exact culprit was identified._________________Sorry for my English. I'm still learning this language.